Scanning Tunneling Microscope

As Nobel Laureates Binnig and Rohrer explain, their breakthroughs came about practically by happenstance, but only after a lengthy period of experimentation. Over time, the scanning tunneling microscope and its successor, the atomic force microscope, became essential devices for nanotechnology research and manufacturing. They’ve enabled today’s emerging advancements and will continue to bring forth as yet unimagined breakthroughs.

The sound of science

“I knew it was a very important moment. I was trying to image a sample that I had tried to image many times before without any success. Suddenly, the microscope’s like [making sound] da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And I can never forget this noise the plotter made because it really had to work hard to follow the atoms that the tip was following—da-da-da-da-da-da-da. A beautiful noise. At this moment, I knew these da’s were all atoms. … The plotter drew a picture and you could see it was an atomic structure. And I knew immediately that’s it, that’s the breakthrough. It was a new world now.”

Gerd Binnig

IBM Fellow, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“A Beautiful Noise,” IEEE Spectrum

May, 2006

“There’s a popular notion of the inventor who has the ‘eureka’ moment in the lab and goes, ‘Ha, I see it.’ The atomic force microscope was an extreme case of eureka because I was not even thinking about it. … But you prepare for such a moment by sorting things out and trying many different approaches. Although they may not be successful, they’re all gathered somewhere in the back of your mind. Because it’s so complex, you can’t solve the problem with your conscious mind. Your subconscious shuffles around all the possibilities and suddenly presents you with a solution. So something like [the eureka moment] exists, but you prepare for it over months and sometimes years.”

Gerd Binnig

IBM Fellow, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“A Beautiful Noise,” IEEE Spectrum

May, 2006

“It was less difficult, finally, than everybody thought. That’s why everybody thought you could not do it. That’s why nobody did it. And that’s, I would say, a crucial thing in science. Everything is new because other people think you cannot do it.”

Heinrich Rohrer

IBM Fellow, retired, 1997, Nobel Laureate, 1986

Interview at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm

April, 2008

“When I give lectures to the public, I always have a little bit of a problem. I tell them, ‘Listen, if I explain to you now what we did in terms that you don’t understand it, you go home and still wonder, “What did these guys do?” And if I explain it to you in terms that you understand it, then you ask yourself, “What, for something so simple, you get the Nobel Prize?”’”

Heinrich Rohrer

IBM Fellow, retired, 1997, Nobel Laureate, 1986

Interview at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm

April, 2008

“… people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.”

Richard P. Feynman

Preeminent physicist, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” transcript Presentation to American Physical Society

December, 1959

“Why can’t we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife’s wrist watch, have you said to yourself, ‘If I could only train an ant to do this!’ What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.”

Richard P. Feynman

Preeminent physicist, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” transcript Presentation to American Physical Society

December, 1959

“When we get to the very, very small world—say circuits of seven atoms—we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc.”

Richard P. Feynman

Preeminent physicist, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” transcript Presentation to American Physical Society

December, 1959

“The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.”

Richard P. Feynman

Preeminent physicist, Nobel Laureate, 1986

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” transcript Presentation to American Physical Society